As a child, I lived in a multicultural community, where everyone was making digs at each other’s race. The less they knew about yours, the more prominent the slurs. There weren’t many East Asians where I grew up. Being of mixed heritage meant that my family wouldn’t fare better in copping out and moving to Chinatown either.
Bruce Lee catcalls. Comments about eating pets. ‘Ni Hao’ being yelled from speeding cars as a way of making one ‘feel at home.’
Welcome to the social interactions faced by an East Asian Brit.
Television, as far as I can remember played a massive part in representing different ethnic communities. The Real McCoy and Goodness Gracious Me were programmes that kept me and my schoolmates abuzz with conversation. Finally, non-white viewers had an actual series they could relate to from the perspective of a non-white person instead of being charitably being written in as a token ‘ethnic’ character.
So when I hear of a children’s sitcom in the works for CBBC about the life of a Chinese family I’m thinking, great, even better, start your good examples early because generally us East Asians are tired. Tired of hearing accents that even our visiting relatives don’t use. Tired of seeing martial arts stunts because not all of us are magicians. Tired of seeing ‘traditional’ coolie hat costumes and stringy facial hair looted from the pound shop. Tired of having the same old stereotypes on TV played by the same East Asian actor shuttling from bootleg seller at one point to a blurry face in the background to boost diversity and inclusion. What’s more, until very recently, seldom do they make it regularly enough on UK screens to become a household name that we can remember.
Living With The Lams is the new BAME baby show for the BBC. It’s a sitcom about a Chinese family running a restaurant. Never mind that most East Asians in this country are in STEM based careers while the rest of us work in offices, like your average Cho, let’s have our maiden series based in a setting just one notch above a laundrette. The show is still in pre production but the Chinese community aren’t happy with it. Little spoilers of the script involve words like ‘Chonger’, cooking dumplings in an oven (remember what MasterChef said about Malaysian Chicken Rendang? You don’t want the Chinese government getting involved in that about dumplings), a dad joining a band called ‘Wok and Roll’ and a Chinese grandmother munching on fortune cookies all day. That alone is enough to make any East Asian, let alone Chinese person puke out their so called fusion Asian dinner from a commercial chain.
You’d think that the person who wrote such travesties was a self-loathing idiot, but it turns out that the series has mostly been written by white writers. Aha.
East Asian writers were invited to collaborate but only in sweatshop conditions, because apparently we’re used to it. Due to the production company being unable to trace a single qualified writer out of four hundred thousand UK citizens of Chinese heritage, East Asian writers were offered to write for the show under provision they worked under reduced payment without credit while ‘buddying up’ with well-meaning non Chinese writers who, seemingly, had magically gained a personal perspective of what it was to be Chinese. You might as well get Jacob Rees-Mogg to write the next Rab C Nesbitt script.
The BBC has sprung almost immediately to its defence, writing a statement just as poor as the show’s current script content. It included the usual corporate rhetoric. ‘We’re really proud of our track record in making diverse and culturally relevant output for our young audience...we always seek guidance, advice and expert input for culturally sensitive content.’ It went on to state that they do not appoint writers “based solely on their cultural affiliations or nationality” and affirmed their confidence in a show that “successfully reflects and celebrates this (Chinese) community.” The statement also tried to gain pity votes by mentioning that the series itself had taken years to build into production.
It’s not an excuse. It’s not a reason. You had years. Not months, not weeks but years to do the job properly. East Asians are not asking to be celebrated. We’re asking to be represented and this is a shoddy response for a long overdue opportunity.
Ask any East Asian person what they were bullied for at school and they will immediately say their race. Is Living with The Lams a twisted attempt of white empathy? I’m not feeling it.
This was the perfect chance for the media to make a positive difference for a hugely marginalised ethnic community in Britain. Not only for children who still face the same racial prejudice as their parents did, but also to give new East Asian talent a chance which the media industry still seriously lacks. Even if the BBC had hired and credited so called junior Chinese writers for each episode, that would be nearly a dozen East Asian voices they would be adding to their diversity pool, which in turn would give a large part of the BAME community the well needed representation. It would’ve broken a cycle where it was difficult to cater for a certain audience due to alleged lack of appropriate talent. That is far from a bad move. Instead what’s been demonstrated is a rusty old formula that does no one any favours including the British Born Chinese or the British Broadcasting Corporation.